How to Analyze Your Competitors With SEOquake

Top-performing content usually has several quality signals driving its success on the SERP. And in many cases, these aren’t immediately obvious.

A competitor could be outranking you because their page is better structured for readability and AI answer extraction, deeper in context, has stronger linking, or is technically more sound.

Or a combination of all of these.

Using an extension like SEOquake is one of the quickest ways to analyze a competitor's page without leaving your current browser tab.

It’s a process that I use in my competitive analysis routine. Here’s what it looks like in a nutshell:

Pick a competitor page to inspect. It’s important to target a specific page so you can extract specific data and metrics associated with it.

Next, click the SEOquake icon from your browser’s extensions menu.

On a supported page, SEOquake will display a report summarizing metadata, page structure, SEO metrics and other details in the Quick View popup.

From that point, you can dive deeper by opening Full Report.

This leads you to the Keyword Density, Links, Compare and Semrush reports.

Naturally, the analysis isn’t as detailed as you’d get from a full-fledged tool like Semrush.

But the point of SEOquake is to equip you with page-level insights that can help you create a page that’s better than your competitors' while you’re browsing and researching.

What Is Competitor Page Analysis?

Competitor page analysis involves deconstructing specific pages to identify their strengths and weaknesses and understand why they’re winning (or failing).

I’ll focus on page-level analysis as opposed to broader industry or domain-level competitor research, such as a multi-competitor keyword gap analysis.

Competitor research at the page level is usually simpler and faster, especially if you’re using an extension like SEOquake to speed up the process. Since the extension is free to install and use, it’s a no-brainer

The goal is simply to find strategic gaps within that page that you can take advantage of as you prepare to create a page with stronger content and SEO focus.

Step-by-Step Process for Competitor Page Analysis With SEOquake

Here’s an outline of the routine I use to gather insights during a quick competitor page research.

Step 1: Pick a Competitor Page to Inspect

While you can start off with any page, it’s worth putting some thought into picking the right target for your analysis.

If you already have a page in mind, that’s great. If not, I recommend thinking of a specific, intent-driven keyword that your competitors are also targeting.

For instance, “convertible car seat reviews” would make sense for brands in the baby products industry.

You can just use Google SERPs to see what comes up and pick the top-ranking page(s) for your analysis.

Tip: Not sure which competitor page to inspect? Find the top competitor pages that deserve a closer look with this free tool.

Once you’ve found the page you want to target, it’s time to take the page apart to find what may be contributing to its performance.

Step 2: Open the Page in SEOquake and Review Page Info

Click open the page in your browser window. Once it’s fully loaded, click on the SEOquake extension from your browser’s extension menu (make sure it’s installed first).

The main popup is called Quick View. It remembers the last tab you used, so start with Page Info for the overview described below.

There are three things to pay attention to before you notice anything else:

• Title tag: Immediately reveals the target keyword and angle of the post
• Meta description: Provides more context about positioning, targeted queries, and intent focus
• Page structure: Let's you see total links, images, headings, and word count on the page..

Taken together, this quick summary gives you a fairly good idea of the page’s target keyword, positioning, target audience, and click-through optimization.

Let’s start with the very basic checks.

For instance, you can instantly tell if the title tag and meta description are within SEOquake’s recommended length ranges.

That tells you how carefully optimized the page is.

A quick read of the title and meta description phrasing also reveals the intent the page is targeting and whether they’re signalling recency with a date in the title.

Next, we’ve got a simple panel highlighting heading, link, image, and word counts.

Review this to get a quick answer about how visual the page is in terms of image usage, the length and depth of content (heading count, distribution, and word count).

Moving forward, you can take a quick look at a basic audit focusing on Robots.txt, Schema.org Markup, and Canonical results.

Anything messy or broken here would reveal an opportunity to create a cleaner page that’s more accessible to search engines and LLMs.

Finally, you can see some key Semrush metrics once you scroll down to the bottom of the menu. These are a mix of domain-level and URL-level scores.

SEOquake pulls this data straight from Semrush.

I’d particularly focus on the URL Backlinks count here. This metric is specific to the page you’re looking at.

Knowing the backlink count helps you size up the competitor page. If you’re up against pages with a high amount of backlinks, your chances of ranking might not look too great.

At the same time, that’s all the more reason to investigate the page deeper to understand why it might be attracting an influx of backlinks.

These basic checks take less than a minute per page.

As a first-pass scan, the SEOquake Quick View menu works wonders to take note of pages worth inspecting more closely.

Step 3: Check the Competitor's Content Structure

Once you’re familiar with the basic info about a page, you can dive deeper into the page content.

You’ll find this report in the Content tab of the extension popup.

By this point, you should already be aware of the metadata and heading count from the previous step.

The next detail you should pay attention to is the heading structure.

This gives you the complete outline of the content you’re reviewing.

You can learn everything you need to know about how the content is organized, the hierarchy of topics, and the exact subtopics the page covers.

That’s the kind of information you need to consider when creating a brief for your content team, or even as you’re drafting content for your website as a competitor.

Going further, the Keyword Density report is a fantastic way to identify important themes and key areas of focus in the competitor page.

You’ll find the most repeated keywords, their density and prominence, and whether they appear in the title tag, meta description, meta keywords, or H1.

This report is a lot more useful when expanded into the full table (as I’ll show in a later step).

For now, you can take a glimpse at the preview to check the placements of important words to understand their structural importance.

The last section is all about images on the page. SEOquake scans your page to count the total number of images.

It will also reveal the number of images with or without alt texts, along with any images with sizing issues.

So if you want to see how images are used and optimized by a competitor at a glance, this is where you need to look.

Step 4: Inspect Keyword Density and Repeated Phrases

Along with the headings summary, the Keyword Density report can show you everything you need to know about key topics and themes on a page.

The keyword table preview is a good starting point, but it’s always a good idea to check the full table to get a better idea of what’s going on.

Click on the View keyword report button to see a table showing the repeated phrases up to 4-words in length.

If you can’t find anything meaningful looking at 1-Word keywords, try reviewing the tabs for longer keyphrases by using the tabs above the table.

To use an example, here are 4-Word keyphrase densities from Zapier’s comparison on Calendly vs Google Calendar.

The phrase “Google Calendar appointment schedule” repeats quite frequently. This plainly tells me that the comparison includes scheduling features of the tools in question as an important supporting topic.

In other words, it’s a key theme recurring throughout the article.

Without this data, I would’ve needed to read the entire page to identify this thematic focus. But the keyword density report makes easy work of that.

You can also click any keyword listed in the table to head straight into the Semrush Keyword Overview tool for detailed metrics and ideas related to the query.

Step 5: Scan the Audit Results

If you do nothing else with SEOquake, this is the one scan you should absolutely perform in order to discover the key strengths and gaps of the competitor page.

The rebuilt SEOquake extension includes 28-page-level checks across on-page SEO, crawling and indexation, and structured data.

Go to the Audit section in the Quick View to see a preview of the audit result.

This will instantly reveal any major errors with HTTP Status, whether robots directives are properly declared, and if an XML sitemap was located.

Errors in these technical aspects can seriously impact a page’s visibility to search engines, something you can capitalize on as a competitor.

The audit goes into a variety of other checks that are worth investigating when you have a page you want to beat.

Click the View audit report button to access the complete report.

The report first highlights the number of checks the page passed, along with total errors and warnings.

Any page with a large number of errors and warnings is likely to be poorly optimized.

Scroll down to the first main category of the scan. This is where the results of the content and on-page inspection appear.

A quick review of the title tag and meta description shows if the topic is clear. You’ll also see whether SEOquake flags their lengths, although Google may display them differently.

Ideally, you want the title and meta description to be long enough to be sufficiently descriptive without any characters being cut off.

The alt attribute check can sometimes trigger a warning, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s a good practice to ensure all contextually meaningful images have an alt text.

Decorative images should use an empty alt attribute (alt="") so screen readers can ignore them.

The internal link scan is another one you should always pay attention to. SEOquake can trigger a warning for several reasons, such as excessive linking, redirects, or broken links.

You can review the link report to take a closer look (I’ll go over this soon).

The latest version of SEOquake also adds some new technical compliance checks.

This includes a basic scan for mobile-friendliness based on viewport tags and responsive design signals.

Although it’s a simple check that doesn’t guarantee ideal mobile-friendliness, it’s helpful to know if a page has mobile layouts in mind at all.

Apart from that, you also get the following:

• HTTP Status: Use this to confirm if the page returns a successful status or if there are any errors affecting the page’s technical compliance.
• Robots.txt: Checks if the page you’re inspecting is allowed so crawlers can access it.
• HTTPS: Shows if the page correctly resolves to a secure HTTPS version
• Canonical: Review correct canonical URL declaration, so there’s no mismatch between the canonical and expected URL (a potential cause of confusion for search engines).
• Schema.org Markup: Looks for existing schema types implemented on the page and highlights the exact structured data being used.
• Open Graph: Ensures Open Graph tags are set so the page metadata and snippet appear correctly on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Twitter Card: Reviews metadata for social previews on X

These are just a few highlights from the audit report, but you should carefully review other checks in the report as well.

You can share the audit report with your team using the export option to save a PDF file of the report.

With most audits, you’ll either be looking at a competitor ranking well despite obvious technical flaws or one that’s got all its bases covered.

In the case of a page with technical issues, you might have a better chance of overtaking them in Google rankings and LLM answers by creating a cleaner page with strong technical compliance and on-page optimization.

But a competitor page with strong technical foundations and well-opimized contact won’t be easy to beat.

It’s usually a good idea to target these tougher opportunities with a lower priority than pages with obvious weaknesses.

Step 6: Review Internal and External Links

The Links report is one of the best features of SEOquake.

It eliminates the manual task of checking how a competitor's page connects to other resources, both within and outside of the domain.

Instead, you get a list of every link found on the page along with its dofollow status.

The summary gives you a count for all links on the page, and how many of these are DoFollow, Nofollow, or Broken.

In my experience, broken links are quite common. That’s confusing for both readers and search engines.

Take note of the broken links on competitor pages and think about how your page can cover those flaws with contextually relevant links.

The table is all the more useful because it’s not just a list of the links. It also shows anchor text for each link, whether it’s DoFollow, and its HTTP status.

Plus, you can check the backlinks pointing to a specific link with just a click. This is a small detail but a super convenient feature to have that’s rare to find in SEO plugins and extensions.

Good internal linking prioritizes related content clusters. As you take a peek into the competitor’s link report, you can uncover the clusters they’re attempting to promote.

This is great to know, so you’ll know where exactly your page should fit thematically around your content clusters.

Analyzing anchor text is also pretty easy in a table like this compared to scanning every single one that appears on the page manually.

If there are certain keywords the competitor is using when linking to their pages, that’s valuable info that you can put into action for improving your own linking.

Remember that this report is great for scanning your own pages as well. Its value isn’t limited to just competitor analysis.

I use SEOquake to spot issues on our own pages:

• Accidental nofollows: There’s rarely a good reason to put nofollow tags on your internal links unless you’re performing a deliberate test. This report is fantastic for spotting wrongly configured links.
• Mismatched anchor-link pairs: With the table, it’s immediately clear if you’ve added the wrong link to an anchor intended for something else.
• Obscure broken links: Broken links can hide like a needle in a haystack. The HTTP status column allows you to spot any broken links without having to click them open one by one.

That’s not all. The Links report has a separate section dedicated to external links.

It reports the same information as the internal link section, but for external links this time. External links can show cited sources or partners that the competitor frequently links to.

Just like before, you can use this to identify anchor text usage, exact links being used, broken links, and dofollow status.

Make sure you’re using the Link report for important pages so you don’t miss out on opportunities arising from weak linking, broken URLs, and poorly optimized anchors on competitor pages.

After you’ve taken a look at the Links reports, you can perform more advanced linking strategies with backlink audits and generate authoritative links to your page using Semrush.

Step 7: Compare Competitor Pages Side by Side

This comes down to individual preference, but when it comes to off-page authority metrics, it’s much easier to gauge the strength of one page when compared directly with another.

The Compare panel in the Full Report greatly simplifies this task.

You can enter 2 or more URLs to pull data for backlinks and Semrush traffic estimates in a side-by-side matrix.

The metrics allow you to see a domain’s overall authority with figures like domain backlinks, traffic, and Semrush rank.

The backlinks count reflects the page-level external links pointing to the URL, so you can perform a direct numerical comparison between your page and your competitor’s

It’s a handy way to spot the authority gap between your URL and a competitor, or between multiple competitors.

You can save quite a few clicks with the URL comparison tab when you need to see which domain has the upper hand in terms of raw backlinks.

But this is a quick benchmarking report and is not meant to replace deep competitive research offered by full-fledged SEO tools like Semrush.

What to Do With Your Findings

Going through these steps with SEOquake will equip you with enough information to create a strategy aimed at beating the competitor in question.

Let’s go through some common action points a competitor page analysis usually makes clear for me:

• Page title and meta description improvements: Note the format, keyword placements, and phrasing of the title and meta description. Then think how you can make it better without copying it. You can afford to be creative here because differentiation, within reason, attracts more clicks than sameness.
• Add missing subtopics: A review of the competitor’s keyword densities and content outline to identify important themes your content might be missing, and cover that gap.
• Add useful internal links: Discover clusters of related content that a well-performing competitor page is linking to and confirm if your cluster of linked content is lacking.
• Fix technical issues: Pay attention to your competitor’s technical compliance and compare it with yours to identify gaps.
• Run a deeper analysis: Competitor research aided by SEOquake isn’t a replacement for a full domain-level audit with tools like Semrush to base your strategy on.

Good competitor page analysis is about deducing from data how your competitor is finding success, and how you can get one step ahead with an even better page.

Don’t just copy the competitor or check off boxes. Use your judgment as a marketer to apply the findings of your research to stand out in usefulness.

When to Use Exploding Topics or Semrush Tools

Despite the many ways SEOquake adds value to your research process, its use is limited to one competitor page analysis at a time.

Exploding Topics has a free SEO competitor analysis tool to help you find competitors and their top pages before you can choose the right page to inspect.

If you have the Semrush Traffic & Market Toolkit, you can connect your Semrush account with SEOquake to see more detailed traffic data. You can also connect a Semrush account without the toolkit to view available backlink data for the page.

Click on the Semrush tab in the right corner of the extension popup. Then press the Connect Semrush button.

This will take you to the Integrations settings. Click the Connect Semrush button here.

If you’re logged into your Semrush account, you’ll just need to approve the access request to enable the integration after pressing Approve.

With Semrush connected, you’ll unlock a more detailed backlink profile for the page you’re inspecting, with metrics like referring domains, referring IPs, and TLD distribution added on top of the total backlink count.

You can move the report’s scope from the specific URL to the domain or root domain as well.

Secondly, the report includes Traffic Analytics as well, showing some key visitor and interaction figures as well as traffic source distribution data.

This is great for seeing which channels your competitor is generating traffic from and understanding their marketing mix.

Put Competitive Insights Into Action for SERP Success

A quick competitor page analysis allows you to familiarize yourself with a competitor without needing to dig deep with a full website audit.

SEOquake excels at speeding up page inspections and highlighting key strengths, weaknesses, and content ideas you can use to your advantage.

I believe in smart workflows. SEOquake makes it very easy for me to decide whether deeper research is in order or if I have enough ideas and data to work with from a quick analysis.

Install SEOquake to analyze competitor pages directly from your browser. This will be your go-to tool for first-pass analysis of competitors.

For your next step, use Exploding Topics for trend research and topic ideas that haven’t become mainstream yet.

Combine that with Semrush for market research and full site audits to support your strategy as you compete for visibility against your top rivals.